


eat it up & crown it

by babelincoln



Category: 2NE1, Big Bang (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Mutants, Gen, Seungri goes by his stage name rather than Seunghyun for differentiation from TOP, The TOP/Bom is kinda subtle and not very Healthy, X-men Inspired
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-21
Updated: 2018-01-21
Packaged: 2019-03-07 10:01:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 3,334
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13432344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/babelincoln/pseuds/babelincoln
Summary: seunghyun is unafraid of being selfish. bom is the first. youngbae doesn’t like to fight. sandara is grasping onto her sensitivity. jiyong tries to be loved. chaerin is a minji short of being the youngest. daesung just wants to go home. minji can become so venemously jealous. seungri is sorry.welcome to hyunsuk’s school for gifted mutants. your days are numbered.• a series of reflections on descent. •





	1. SEUNGHYUN

**Author's Note:**

> NOTE: the chronology is a little iffy here but the age gaps between everyone is the same as in real life. for the most part minji is 14 and bom & dara are 24, and so everyone else’s age is easy to work out according to birth year!

seunghyun is unafraid of being selfish.

the fact of the matter is, at 21 years old, he already knows that he'll die soon. hyunsuk is going to lead him to an early grave and blame it on chaerin. unless chaerin dies first and bom is inevitably promoted to leader. then he'll blame it on bom.

seunghyun is one of the first to go out on the field, and as the field team grows from four to eight, all he can think is what a miracle it is that nobody has died yet. but it's such a huge yet. he probably won't be the first to go, but he doesn't know that for sure. that's the frustrating thing. it's too hard to predict how this'll all come to close. daesung could be shot down from the air. sandara's gift is so passive, get her on her own and she's toast. hell, speaking of toast, jiyong; who has such little control over his powers, could burn them all to a crisp.  

it's hard to stay positive and it's hard to stay selfless. once upon a time, he was noble and twinkly eyed and exactly the kind of boy scout that hyunsuk needs for this little team. but some time between bom's smiles becoming rare and chaerin's hands developing a habit for shaking 24/7, he starts fucking around.

he's robbed of his childhood, robbed of a normal life, but also robbed of his actions ever having any permanent consequence. other than death, of course.

the nine of them are all each other's got in the world, so grudges are impossible to keep. and hyunsuk needs their loyalty, so punishments are generic and tame- school shit, like writing lines. seungri is naturally licentious, so seunghyun flirts back. only because when they get a little back and forth going with that, the heartbroken, confused expression on jiyong’s face is very pretty. he wonders if one day he can make jiyong so sad that they’ll all go up in flames.

he likes to question chaerin's orders in the field. she struggles with balancing her leader role with the age hierarchy, so she'll let him make his suggestions and reroute the entire plan. then, they fail the mission and she has to _write lines_.

less life-threatening but perhaps more morally wrong is his hobby of fucking around with bom. she tries to be the ice queen, but he's known her since she wore her big giant heart on her sleeve. it's so easy to melt her down. coax her into her old self, and bask in her sun. enjoy the springtime before it forces itself to be winter.  then, when she’s given him what he wanted, he makes a comment. mocks her laugh, or asks if she’s not gotten as much exercise recently. bom frosts back up. and since she’s the type of person who thinks her silence is a punishment, nobody ever finds out about his manipulation, not even after he does it again and again.

he doesn’t feel guilty. they will all die before they see twenty six.

he is unafraid of being selfish.


	2. BOM

bom is the first.

leader or not, she is the first. nobody can take that away. even if it's seldom acknowledged and doesn't come easy with the matriarchal position she sometimes thinks it should. she was the one that once had to haunt these halls on her own, with only hyunsuk for company.

she thinks she may have given hyunsuk the wrong idea of how easy this school could be. she must have. all she does is bring plants to life. it's easy to control, and easy to weaponize. plants are beautiful and they are free and they are wild, but they're easily manipulated. once you know the right words to say to them, they will let you order them around and pollute them. the others are more difficult. they have powers that are complicated- some are invisible, you just have to believe them when they say they're working. they're a little harder to say the right words to.

so often, in their first year of field work, even when the field team is just her and seunghyun and youngbae and chaerin, she finds herself justifying their missions when the others question their goals. she has to. this has been so strictly and voluminously her entire life. she believes so greatly in hyunsuk's vision- a future where humans and mutants could exist in peace. peace cannot exist 'till you weed out the protesters, right? and truly, even if they question the validity of their ‘missions’, they all have such a childish admiration for hyunsuk, at first. they feel they owe him. they're as willing to be motivated as the plants are.

besides, life before was so boring and mundane. bom has always been told that she was destined for greatness. so when she comes to hyunsuk's school, she's bright and cheerful and great. if her impact on the world is to be as a freedom fighter, she'll own it. she'll eat it up and crown it.

then, maybe in the second year on the field, sandara takes a hit so hard that bom thinks she has died. and even though sandara is okay, bom realises that this isn't a game. they're not superheroes. any one of them could die at any given moment on the field.

she's a fool. she always has been. optimistic to the point of idiocy. she supposes she's like plants in many ways- beautiful and wild and free but so easy to manipulate. and their dear teacher knows all the right words. sooner or later, bom thinks that they all come to realise that something has to be done about yang hyunsuk.

she is the first.


	3. YOUNGBAE

youngbae doesn’t like to fight.

they’ve all been given gifts. that’s why they’re here. people with gifts- mutants, but what a terrible word that is, are being routinely murdered and/or experimented upon by the government. this is their salvation. they are safe here. they will learn to use their gifts, learn to conceal and control them. and then, they will be able to integrate back into society, and live without fear.

but what a terrible lie that is.

even before his gift manifests itself, youngbae is the sun. he’s hopeful and he brings light. he spills it from his palms and twists it into beauty. he is the sun and he is prisms and he is auroras.

when the field missions come, chaerin, three years his junior, is his leader. bom uses the earth around her like a revolver. seunghyun drives fear and ferocity into their opponents, turns them on each other. makes them believe they are drowning or crawling with insects or whichever primal vice they fall crippled to.

and youngbae, driven by adrenaline, holds up his palms and uses his gift to blind eyes and boil skin. and he feels to be winning a video game and he feels proud. he is the sun and he is powerful and fearful. he is the sun and he is god.

he has no injuries and is allowed to head straight to bed, where he lays and cannot close his eyes without seeing burnt faces and dead eyes.

what a terrible god he is.

he doesn’t like to fight.


	4. SANDARA

sandara is grasping onto her sensitivity.

if twenty-four is too old to still be crying over injuries and seeking comfort when she is afraid, then sandara doesn’t care about appropriate levels of maturity. she has lived her entire life, even before the ocean spoke to her and told her her own secrets, filled with worry and anxiety. after hyunsuk promised her safety and gave her a war zone, how can sandara ever be calm again?

seungri tells her that she is a headache to be around. it’s hurtful, but she can understand. seungri who can feel everyone else- tap into everything that makes them them. how could he bare to be left with sandara, who feels so many things so intensely all at once?

regardless, she makes no apology and no effort to follow his advice to ‘chill the fuck out’.  

her worry is deeply rooted and it’s a part of her. if she tried to conceal it, it’d still be there. and it’d boil over eventually, perhaps at the detriment of everyone around her. you cannot contain an ocean. you can take and take but it’ll never run out. you’d need a whole hell of buckets. and  as much as they roll their eyes, the team need sandara, and her anxiety. she is a one woman fight-or-flight response. without her analysis, she knows they would charge into every situation horns first, and they would die a lot earlier than they need to. 

and if they need her tears to feel pity, or her jittering to feel irritation, then she will provide. emotions make a human. she is all emotion and she reminds them. they are human. 

so, she winces as daesung takes the cloth to the cuts on her face. she nods when he asks if it hurts. she shrugs in good nature when he says sorry with a little smile. and later on, when bom wakes up in the middle of the night and begins to sob, sandara gets out of her bed and walks across their room to sit on the edge of bom’s mattress, and runs fingers through her hair and hushes her and tells her it’s okay.

she is grasping onto her sensitivity.


	5. JIYONG

jiyong tries to be loved.

his brain makes it a lot more complicated than it needs to be. people-pleasing comes so naturally. with every charming grin, every cheerful salute to chaerin's instructions, he makes himself so likeable. not lovable, though, and therein lies the problem. it's not even like it plagues his thoughts. everything is normal when the nine of them are on the field as a team, or when they're gathered around hyunsuk for a group lesson. jiyong is popular, and he feels it. but he wishes he didn't. if he felt so empty, so utterly worthless all of the time, it wouldn't be such a nuisance when he finds himself suffering again.

too often, he has a good day and ends it by yelling at seungri. he raises his voice and accuses him of finding him likeable and not lovable.

seungri is a little younger and a lot less visceral, and he tries to fix it by kissing up jiyong's neck and taking extra care when he pushes into him. jiyong tries not to think too hard about the possibility that seungri only fucks him cause they're the only two gay kids at the school. then his body starts heating up with each thrust, until he's so hot that he burns and seungri curses loud when the sheets catch fire.

the flames are easily beaten out by seungri's shirt. it happens from time to time- not often enough to stop giving it a shot. in the morning, hyunsuk gives jiyong the money for new bedsheets without question (seungri wonders if he thinks jiyong is having nightmares; but jiyong knows hyunsuk knows about them. adults are too embarrassed to ask questions about sex.) but for the night they ignore the smell of smoulder. seungri looks to lay his lips on something, but the fire never fails to make jiyong see images of his childhood home, of his mother and father and sister, of the way the red wraps around him as if it's his. the way it doesn't burn his flesh. the way it burns everything- everyone else. jiyong rolls over right to where the bed meets the wall and keeps going until his forehead rests against the plaster. he steals all the covers but seungri does not get mad. and when he kisses the back of his neck, it's not a come on but a goodnight. jiyong is filled with hate, because seungri will so often show how he loves jiyong and jiyong will still question it tomorrow night.

he tries to be loved.


	6. CHAERIN

chaerin is a minji shy of being the youngest. 

and it's not as if she's particularly headstrong. she can be fierce, and her opinions matter to her. she'll argue them if she needs to, but it would take a lot for her to go to war. she's always been respectful of her elders. in the early days, the hierarchy was never vocally established but always silently understood. two unnies, five oppas sandwiched in between, and then she and minji as the babies. 

minji is still so sheltered and taken care of. she is the token kid, left home on missions. chaerin misses being handled with kid gloves. but when the voltage gets pumped up and it's time for hyunsuk's plan to fall into motion, time for them to use their gifts for good, they need a team leader. it's just black ops- it's not the wondrous, brightly coloured comic book adventures minji dreams of. but it doesn't matter. no team is a team without a leader.

but sandara is too meek and bom is not meek enough. seunghyun is too unstable, youngbae is too much of a lover and not enough of a fighter. jiyong is afraid of his own gift and daesung follows orders with the loyalty only a child of a military family could, but wouldn't know how to give one if it could save his life. seungri is still a child, more so than chaerin. everybody else grew up too fast and seungri still managed to grow up at the rate he should. and minji, who was taken to the school before she even had a teen in her age, is never even considered. so chaerin becomes the definition of the phrase de facto. the best worst choice.

bom used to sprout daisies from the tips of her fingers and tuck them between minji's ears. she'd see how many leaves she could hide in sandara's hair before she was found out. chaerin watches her force trenches into the ground and make the earth quake so hard that plates of glass fall from the windows of the buildings around her. (so much for black ops.) chaerin watches and wonders, not for the first time, what the hell she's leading this team towards. later in the night, when everyone is nursing their wounds and bom makes no effort to cheer up sandara, who's crying over the pain of her broken ankle, chaerin watches her instead stare blankly to the wall and grasp seunghyun's hand with white knuckles. she asks hyunsuk why he chose her to be leader, even though she knows. chaerin is the right level of meek, she is stable and a healthy mix of lover and fighter. she doesn't fear her powers and is good at giving orders. and she grew up swiftly as soon as hyunsuk needed her to be grown up. she knows, but she wants him to tell her. he doesn't- just reminds her that she's field leader, not team leader. that role falls to him.

she's a minji shy of being the youngest. 


	7. DAESUNG

daesung just wants to go home.

he's robbed of that choice when the wings sprouted from his back. his father had done so much in the field of killing off mutants like him. daesung is so very lucky that his gift comes in a two for one with the means to run away.

but at least when he was following orders at home, it was easy. tidy his room. sort out his clothes. do the dishes. don't be so rude to your mother. if daesung could sever these 'gifts' from his shoulders and go back to those orders, he'd never ever talk back to his mother again. it beat striking from the air. at least the others could say they killed in self defense. sure, the people they fight would take daesung down without a second thought, but he gets them before they can even have the first one. it seems so unjust. it feels like living up to the vicious stereotypes hyunsuk promised him this horrible school would put an end to. 

daesung has very little to say on the matter. he once was so talkative, but ever since he took that first life, he's kept it brief. he's seen chaerin crumble and then rebuild herself out of stone more times than he can count. he's seen jiyong break his own heart every time seungri smiles back at seunghyun or youngbae. he's seen bom, who once loved with all her heart and then some, stop giving a shit. he's seen little minji, with fourteen years of life and nothing else, want so passionately to be like them. but he's said so little. because saying means caring, and honestly, he doesn't want that.

he just wants to go home.


	8. MINJI

minji can become so venomously jealous. 

she wants it all. the glory and the gore. but they get all the glory and she just gets bored. it frustrates her, because she could be so powerful if hyunsuk would let her. she can already run so fast. she's stronger than most of the team. heightened condition may seem boring on paper, especially when chaerin can rearrange rooms with the blink of an eye, and jiyong can make fire dance or destroy at his whim. but surely, if anything, it'd make her a damn good soldier. 

they're not to view themselves as soldiers, of course. hyunsuk tells her that with disdain. minji can read people real good, though. her willingness to fight concerns him, because she doesn't care if she dies in the line of fire. (or in a fire, even. it's a possibility until jiyong sorts his issues out.) 

minji thinks that, to a degree, hyunsuk has her sussed. he can see that she's willing to fight and die, but not for him. she just wants to fight. he fears her. he wonders if she might turn on him. that's why he won't help her get any stronger. why he's repressing her. 

minji thinks about it as she sits in her bathroom, running chaerin's lipstick over her lips and practising all the smiles she's learned. unknowingly, sandara has taught her how to smile in a way that is prettily innocent. bom has taught her how to light up the room- a grin that beams brighter than a sun goddess. she's learned from jiyong to smirk like a fox seducing it's pray. 

she applies chaerin's lipstick and smiles because she knows she's becoming the best bits of all eight of her would-be teammates, and even the best bits (however small) of hyunsuk. she smiles, because how easy it'll be, then. she smiles, because he's right to fear her. 

she can become so venomously jealous. 


	9. SEUNGRI

__ seungri is sorry. 

because she does it so fast. he should have warned them, but she doesn't give him any opportunity. he just feels hyunsuk's fear. he feels something feral in her. something he hadn't even felt from human supremacists, or any non-human adversary. and her feral feeling doesn't fade when she looks up at them, hyunsuk's heart in her fist and a grin on her face. he feels the team's shock. he feels their relief, because hyunsuk is over. but, in his defence, he has to make this clear- she doesn't calm down. jiyong grabs his hand in fear, and so seungri takes the opportunity to channel his boyfriend's powers even after promising he never would. he douses her in flame. from behind him, bom screams. he feels her rage, and it's nowhere near feral. he feels youngbae's confusion. seunghyun understands. chaerin is just afraid. sandara leaps straight to anguish. strangely, daesung begins to yearn for home. 

he feels jiyong stop loving him. just like that, after three years of seungri's love being put on trial, jiyong is over it. he's a little bitter. but he did what he had to.

minji was a friend. really, he is sorry. 

**Author's Note:**

> slams my head against the table I hate writing actually  
> I didn’t know what this was gonna be when i started writing it and... I still don’t know what it is. But I wrote 9/9 chapters (albeit they are teensy weensy) in one go and that’s something, at least.  
> tense is my natural enemy at the best of times but i struggled like hell with it writing this so if you have any tips or noticed any glaring mistakes in the tense of this story please share your thoughts i am a happy recipient!  
> also sorry i wanted to write a happy, campy 60’s comic book esque au and I got... this? which couldn’t be FURTHER but whatever kek I might still write my campy superhero au one day!!! but the x-men are just so easy to make dark and edgy and I am a sucker  
> Hope you liked it please take a moment to leave a comment they’re my favourite to read!


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